Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Agricultural and Veterinary Chemicals Legislation Amendment (Operational Efficiency) Bill 2017—a bill that's finally before the Senate more than a year after it was passed through the House.

This bill was meant to deal with the important issue of the effectiveness and efficiency of the national system for regulating agvet chemicals. But the government's handling of this bill shows how it cannot be trusted to handle even the most basic legislative changes. The proposed legislative changes, as set out in this bill, would streamline industry reporting, support the operational efficiency of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, clarify ambiguities in the legislation and remove unnecessary and redundant provisions.

The APVMA is, of course, the independent Australian government regulator of agricultural and veterinary chemicals. Specifically, the changes propose to reduce the regulatory burden on industry by: simplifying reporting requirements for annual returns; reducing the administrative burden on the APVMA and industry by increasing the flexibility of the APVMA to manage errors in an application of the preliminary assessment-rating stage; enabling it to grant part of a variation application under section 27 of the schedule to the code act—the Agvet Code; enabling a person to apply to vary the relevant particulars or conditions of a label approval that is suspended to the extent that the variation relates to the grounds for suspension; establishing civil pecuniary penalties for contraventions of provisions relating to providing false or misleading information in the Agvet Code and the Administration Act; amending the notification requirements in section 8E of the Agvet Code so that the APVMA—